[{"date":"2026-03-15","title":"Casey Driessen: Sunday Bazaar w/ special guest Craig Havighurst","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"#### Featuring a Special Conversation with Craig Havighurst on *Musicality for Modern Humans*\r\n\r\n**Casey Driessen** has spent twenty-five years proving that a fiddle can go anywhere. Twenty-two countries on four continents. A year traveling with his family through Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Japan, and Finland, recording with local masters in whatever room or field or cabin presented itself, documenting everything. Four solo albums. A one-man live looping show called The Singularity. Four years directing a master's program at Berklee College of Music's campus in Valencia. Collaborations with Béla Fleck, Steve Earle, Jerry Douglas, Abigail Washburn, Steve Martin and Martin Short. A GRAMMY nomination. A standardized notation system for the percussive bowing technique known as chopping, which he helped develop and then gave away for free so fiddlers around the world could share a common language. And always, always, the red shoes.\r\n\r\nHis Sunday Bazaar residency at Little Jumbo is exactly what its name suggests — a market of sound laid out across a single evening, where fiddle loops and global grooves and sonic experiments pile up like goods from distant ports. Driessen builds music in real time using pedals and loops, layering his five-string fiddle into orchestral architecture that can shift from Appalachian melody to Indian raga to Finnish folk tune within the span of a single piece. No two nights sound alike because the whole point is that they shouldn't.\r\n\r\nThis month, the Bazaar expands to include a conversation with **Craig Havighurst**, Nashville-based music journalist, broadcaster, and author of the new book *Musicality for Modern Humans: How to Listen Like an Artist*. Havighurst has spent more than twenty-five years covering the art, commerce, and culture of American music — as a reporter for NPR and the Wall Street Journal, as editorial director of WMOT Roots Radio, as host of the weekly interview show *The String*, and as the author of *Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City*. His new book, which Kirkus calls a \"warm, wise guide to hearing music — and each other — with renewed clarity,\" argues that anyone can deepen their relationship with music by learning to listen actively rather than passively, by paying attention to tone, time, and timbre the way a musician does, by resisting the algorithm and rebuilding a musical diet from curiosity rather than habit.\r\n\r\nIt is, in other words, a book about doing exactly what Little Jumbo asks its audience to do every week — walk into a room, follow your ears, and discover something you weren't expecting. Driessen and Havighurst have known each other for years, and their conversation will move between the ideas in the book and the live demonstration of those ideas happening in real time on the Bazaar stage. What does it mean to listen like an artist? What happens when you sit down with musicians you've never met, in places you've never been, and try to find common ground through sound? How do you stay curious in an age designed to flatten your attention?","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1053/casey-driessen-sunday-bazaar-w-special-guest-craig-havighurst","updated_at":"2026-03-02T00:20:43.958Z"},{"date":"2026-03-16","title":"Michael Rabinowitz Quartet ft. Steve Davidowski","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"The bassoon is the oldest voice in this room. Not **Rick Dilling**, who has been playing these mountains for over fifty years. Not **Steve Davidowski**, who was making records with the Dixie Dregs before most of the cocktail menu's ingredients were invented. Not **Zack Page**, who has averaged 275 gigs a year for three decades and counting. *The bassoon itself* — an instrument whose lineage stretches back centuries, whose double reed carries the memory of court music and cathedral acoustics and the low murmur of orchestral pits — is the eldest presence on stage tonight. And **Michael Rabinowitz**, the only musician in jazz history to build an entire career around improvising on it, is the one who taught it to speak this language.\r\n\r\nWhat makes this particular quartet so striking is not just the caliber of each player, though the combined résumé could fill a small library. It's the convergence of four musicians who each, in their own way, chose to step outside the expected frame. Rabinowitz walked away from the orchestral tradition to blow bebop through a double reed. Davidowski walked away from the Dixie Dregs at the height of their momentum to play saxophone and keyboards with Vassar Clements. Page has spent a lifetime refusing to choose between gypsy jazz and heavy metal, between cruise ships and mountain hollows. Dilling drove to North Carolina to play golf and accidentally became the rhythmic foundation of an entire region's jazz scene. None of them took the obvious path. All of them ended up here.\r\n\r\nRabinowitz brings his own compositions to the bandstand — music that moves with a composer's intention and an improviser's restlessness, shaped by decades inside the Charles Mingus Orchestra and collaborations with Wynton Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Chris Potter, and Anthony Braxton. Davidowski meets him there with the harmonic instincts of a musician who cut his teeth alongside Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius at the University of Miami and never stopped absorbing new vocabularies. Page and Dilling lock in underneath with the kind of telepathy that only comes from years of shared bandstands — Page building his architectural bass lines, Dilling doing what he has always done, which is make every musician around him sound like the best version of themselves.\r\n\r\nThis is a quartet assembled from four different compass points of American music — New York loft jazz, southern fusion, Appalachian roots, big band swing — meeting in a room on Broadway Street where the strange art watches and the cocktails are worth lingering over. The bassoon will fill the space the way it always does: with a sound that is simultaneously ancient and utterly new, comic and tender, deep enough to feel in your sternum. Free, as always, because that's how Monday nights work at Little Jumbo.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1183/michael-rabinowitz-quartet-ft-steve-davidowski","updated_at":"2026-02-16T18:23:42.119Z"},{"date":"2026-03-17","title":"Sanders, Boyd, Page \u0026 Hall","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"Every atom in your body was forged in the belly of a dying star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon threading through every strand of your DNA — all of it cooked at temperatures beyond human language, scattered across the void, and reassembled over billions of years into something that walks into a bar on a Tuesday night and listens.\r\n\r\nSanders, Boyd, Page \u0026 Hall are four collections of stellar debris who have chosen to spend their brief window of consciousness making original music together. Not playing songs. Not running repertoire. Building something in real time from the raw material of attention, instinct, and decades of accumulated craft — compositions that didn't exist before these particular particles arranged themselves around instruments in this particular room.\r\n\r\nSanders' guitar refracts melody through a prism of everything from Sharrock to Hartford, bending light no one else can see. Boyd's reeds and winds carry frequencies rooted in the red clay churches of South Carolina, now orbiting through dimensions his EWI opens like airlock doors. Page — a man who has averaged 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties — provides gravitational pull, the low-end mass that keeps the whole system from flying apart. And Hall, four decades deep into a conversation with rhythm, treats percussion less like timekeeping and more like particle physics — breaking beats into smaller and smaller pieces until something fundamental reveals itself.\r\n\r\nTheir compositions move through jazz, soul, free improvisation, Americana, noise, and territories that don't have names yet. The through-composed pieces give way to groove explorations that give way to the kind of collective free fall where nobody knows what's coming next and everybody trusts the landing. It's the sound of matter becoming aware of itself and deciding to swing.\r\nLittle Jumbo curates evenings like this one — where the creature on the wall watches over a room full of exploded stars who showed up to experience something unrepeatable. This is free. Always free. The universe doesn't charge admission to witness itself in motion.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1414/sanders-boyd-page-hall","updated_at":"2026-02-16T18:28:40.785Z"},{"date":"2026-03-23","title":"Jack Wilkins Quartet","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"**Jack Wilkins** has spent his career turning landscapes into music. Not metaphorically — literally. As a composer-in-residence at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies, he wrote pieces shaped by glacial ridgelines and the particular silence of high altitude. At Acadia National Park in Maine, he composed a suite inspired by the crusade of cars climbing Cadillac Mountain at sunrise and the rhythms of the Atlantic against granite. In the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where he grew up in Greensboro listening to his older brothers play Maceo Parker and Jr. Walker records, he created *The Blue and Green Project* — a recording that braided Appalachian roots music with jazz and R\u0026B, incorporating the sound of a blacksmith's anvil from a shop in Spruce Pine. Seven albums as a leader. A Fulbright Scholar appointment at the University of Calgary. Artist residencies in Sweden and Appalachia and along the coast of Maine. Featured soloist on Chuck Owen's *River Runs* and *Whispers on the Wind*, both Grammy Award finalists. Thirty-plus years directing Jazz Studies at the University of South Florida, where his USF Jazztet has played Montreux, North Sea, Vienne, and Umbria and toured South Africa. JazzTimes once noted that despite his academic credentials, there is nothing academic about his playing — that what sets him apart is his emotional directness, his ability to swing from the heels up.\r\n\r\nHe keeps coming back to North Carolina. Every Christmas he returns to Greensboro to play with Piedmont Songbag. The mountains pull at him. And tonight they've pulled him to Little Jumbo, where he's leading a quartet built from musicians who understand what it means to let a place get inside your sound.\r\n\r\n**Andy Page** holds the guitar chair. Senior lecturer of jazz guitar at Appalachian State's Hayes School of Music for more than two decades, Andy is Zack Page's identical twin — the one who got the guitar when their father handed out instruments on Christmas morning. He has carried that guitar from the Montreux Jazz Festival to Japan's Muroran Jazz Cruise to German jazz workshops, but chose to plant himself in Boone, where the Blue Ridge informs everything he plays. His courses range from jazz improvisation to the History of Rock Music to Heavy Metal Culture, because the Page brothers never believed in walls between genres.\r\n\r\n**Zack Page** is on bass. The twin who got the four-string inheritance, Zack has played roughly eight thousand performances since the mid-1990s — a career that runs from Billy Higgins and Delfeayo Marsalis in New York to co-founding Asheville's gypsy jazz ensemble One Leg Up to anchoring sessions at Landslide Studio with Jeff Sipe. He graduated summa cum laude from UNC Wilmington, played Montreux while still in college, and has spent the decades since proving his father's theory that every good band needs a good bass man. Putting the Page twins on the same stage with Wilkins means three musicians with deep North Carolina roots and decades of shared musical geography — Appalachian State, UNC system, the same mountain air moving through different instruments.\r\n\r\n**Justin Watt** holds down the drums. Born in Ravenna, Ohio, trained at Kent State and Youngstown State with teachers from the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra, Watt spent two years touring with the Glenn Miller Orchestra across the United States, Japan, and Canada before settling in Asheville in 2008. He has since become one of the region's most in-demand drummers, anchoring the Keith Davis, Like Mind, and Asheville Art trios, performing with the Asheville Jazz Orchestra, and co-curating the Asheville Original Music Series. He teaches at UNC Asheville, Furman, and the Asheville Music School — a musician whose versatility spans big band precision and intimate trio conversation with equal commitment.\r\n\r\nThis is a quartet of educators who never stopped being players, of players who never let teaching calcify their instincts. Wilkins brings the landscape — the ridgelines, the national parks, the mountain music of his childhood. The Pages bring the family frequency, the twin telepathy, the accumulated weight of thousands of gigs. Watt brings the Ohio precision tempered by seventeen years of Asheville's anything-goes ethos. Little Jumbo's curated Monday series brings the room — small enough that every note lands somewhere, dark enough that the creature in the corner can listen without being disturbed. This one's free.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1198/jack-wilkins-quartet","updated_at":"2026-02-16T20:01:51.737Z"},{"date":"2026-03-24","title":"Sanders, Boyd, Page \u0026 Hall","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"Sanders, Boyd, Page \u0026 Hall distill the pure essence of improvisational expression, converging as alchemists of sound, transmuting musical elements into their most essential forms. This quartet embodies the philosophical concept of quintessence—the fifth element beyond earth, air, fire, and water—representing the fundamental substance from which all musical reality springs.\r\n\r\nTheir original compositions crystallize the essential qualities of diverse influences, oscillating between through-composed musical themes, groove-based soul explorations, traditional jazz-influenced pieces, Americana-inspired peaceful melodicism, world music influences, free jazz adventures, and occasional forays into cacophonous noise music. Through years of improvisational study, they've learned to access that rarefied space where genres dissolve into pure creative energy.\r\n\r\nIn this musical laboratory, Sanders' guitar becomes a conduit for universal vibration, Boyd's reeds channel the breath of consciousness itself, Page's bass provides the fundamental frequency of existence, while Hall's percussion creates the rhythmic heartbeat of the cosmos.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1415/sanders-boyd-page-hall","updated_at":"2026-02-16T18:17:29.117Z"},{"date":"2026-03-30","title":"Brian Felix Organ Trio w/ special guest Jacob Rodriguez","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"The Brian Felix Organ Trio is the jazz/funk organ group of the future. Rooted in the deep traditions of organ-driven jazz, funk, and soul, the trio blends reggae, samba, surf rock, gospel, and ambient soundscapes into a unified and forward-looking musical vision. Known for its telepathic interplay, deep grooves, and daring spontaneity, the trio has been captivating audiences throughout the southeastern United States. The group’s most recent release, Level Up (Slimtrim Records, 2025), a collection of all-original compositions, has been described as “delightful and eclectic” (Noah Baerman, noahjazz.com) and its title track appeared as All About Jazz’s “Jazz Song of the Day.”\r\n\r\nBased in Asheville, NC (USA), Brian Felix is an internationally recognized jazz keyboardist and organist whose work spans groove-based improvisation, jazz-rock, and contemporary creative music. He was co-leader of OM Trio, an acclaimed San Francisco–based jazz-rock group that toured internationally from 1999–2004. Felix has performed at venues and festivals including the Fillmore Auditorium and Great American Music Hall (San Francisco), the Bowery Ballroom and Mercury Lounge (New York City), and the Aberdeen Jazz Festival (Scotland). His performance history includes collaborations with Joshua Redman, Charlie Hunter, Umphrey’s McGee, Sara Caswell, Billy Hart, Joe Russo, Kelly Sill, and Dave Fiuczynski.\r\n\r\nThe regular working trio features guitarist Tim Fischer and drummer Evan Martin, both integral voices in shaping the group’s sound and musical chemistry.\r\n\r\nFelix is also a Professor of Music at UNC Asheville, where he teaches jazz theory and improvisation, jazz ensembles, music business, keyboard skills, The Beatles, and The Grateful Dead.\r\n\r\nWebsite: www.brianfelix.com","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1186/brian-felix-organ-trio-w-special-guest-jacob-rodriguez","updated_at":"2026-01-13T14:55:42.979Z"},{"date":"2026-03-31","title":"Sanders, Boyd, Page \u0026 Hall","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"Every atom in your body was forged in the belly of a dying star. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, the carbon threading through every strand of your DNA — all of it cooked at temperatures beyond human language, scattered across the void, and reassembled over billions of years into something that walks into a bar on a Tuesday night and listens.\r\n\r\nSanders, Boyd, Page \u0026 Hall are four collections of stellar debris who have chosen to spend their brief window of consciousness making original music together. Not playing songs. Not running repertoire. Building something in real time from the raw material of attention, instinct, and decades of accumulated craft — compositions that didn't exist before these particular particles arranged themselves around instruments in this particular room.\r\n\r\nSanders' guitar refracts melody through a prism of everything from Sharrock to Hartford, bending light no one else can see. Boyd's reeds and winds carry frequencies rooted in the red clay churches of South Carolina, now orbiting through dimensions his EWI opens like airlock doors. Page — a man who has averaged 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties — provides gravitational pull, the low-end mass that keeps the whole system from flying apart. And Hall, four decades deep into a conversation with rhythm, treats percussion less like timekeeping and more like particle physics — breaking beats into smaller and smaller pieces until something fundamental reveals itself.\r\n\r\nTheir compositions move through jazz, soul, free improvisation, Americana, noise, and territories that don't have names yet. The through-composed pieces give way to groove explorations that give way to the kind of collective free fall where nobody knows what's coming next and everybody trusts the landing. It's the sound of matter becoming aware of itself and deciding to swing.\r\nLittle Jumbo curates evenings like this one — where the creature on the wall watches over a room full of exploded stars who showed up to experience something unrepeatable. This is free. Always free. The universe doesn't charge admission to witness itself in motion.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1416/sanders-boyd-page-hall","updated_at":"2026-02-16T18:28:55.359Z"},{"date":"2026-04-06","title":"Quinn Sternberg's Mind Beach","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"Dive into the sonic waves of Quinn Sternberg's Mind Beach—where jazz becomes a landscape and every note washes over you like tide meeting shore.\r\n\r\nThis isn't your typical Monday night. It's an expedition into the spaces between beats, where four master musicians construct entire worlds from reed, string, skin, and ivory. Quinn Sternberg's bass serves as your anchor, holding gravity steady while Jacob Rodriguez's baritone sax paints horizons in deep indigo. Joe Enright's drums pulse like the heartbeat beneath sand, and Alex Taub's piano keys shimmer like moonlight on water.\r\n\r\nMind Beach isn't a place—it's a state of being. It's where mountain soul meets metropolitan sophistication, where tradition and exploration shake hands and decide to dance. These aren't just players; they're architects of the invisible, building bridges between what jazz was and what it could become.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1191/quinn-sternberg-s-mind-beach","updated_at":"2026-03-01T15:28:51.075Z"},{"date":"2026-04-13","title":"The CORE","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"Consider the distances traveled to arrive at this particular room on this particular Monday night. A trumpet that has filled Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House alongside Michael Bublé, now playing three feet from your cocktail glass. A baritone saxophone that has shared air with Aretha Franklin, Robert Glasper, and Ambrose Akinmusire, now threading low-register phrases through the murmur of a crowded bar. A piano that might have stayed silent forever if a freak lip injury hadn't ended a promising trumpet career and sent a political science major from Capitol Hill back to his parents' house in Nebraska to woodshed eight hours a day until his hands could do what his mouth no longer could. A bass that has crossed every ocean and touched every continent, anchored gypsy jazz and heavy metal and everything unnamed in between. And drums that came to a guitarist who switched instruments and discovered that rhythm was the question he'd been trying to answer all along.\r\n\r\nThe Core is what happens when five musicians with no business being in the same band end up becoming the most natural ensemble in Asheville.\r\n\r\n**Justin Ray** and **Jacob Rodriguez** came to these mountains on the same wave — Bublé bandmates who fell for Western North Carolina during a break from touring arenas in forty-five countries. Ray, an Albuquerque native trained at Berklee and USC, had already logged years on the Los Angeles scene with Peter Erskine and Kurt Elling before the arena years began. Rodriguez, a San Antonio kid who grew up on his brother's NWA and Guns N' Roses records before an eighth-grade Duke Ellington album rearranged his priorities, earned dual degrees at the Manhattan School of Music under Joe Temperley. Both chose Asheville. Both now teach at UNC Asheville. Both understand that a room this size demands more honesty than any stadium ever could.\r\n\r\n**Bill Bares** arrived from another direction entirely. A military brat who landed in Omaha, he was good enough on trumpet to make the McDonald's All-American Band before the injury that rerouted his life. Amherst College gave him a political science degree. D.C. jazz clubs gave him the itch. The University of Miami's jazz program — where his piano teacher had studied with Oscar Peterson and roomed with Bill Evans — gave him the vocabulary. A Harvard ethnomusicology Ph.D. gave him the framework to think about jazz as cultural history. Teaching stints at Brown, Berklee, and the New England Conservatory gave him the pedagogy. And then Asheville gave him the room to put it all together, night after night, as director of jazz studies at UNC Asheville and as a pianist whose touch carries the weight of everything he's studied and everywhere he's been.\r\n\r\n**Zack Page** has been averaging 275 gigs a year since the mid-nineties. Born in Virginia, raised on his father's Duck Dunn records and his mother's old-time Appalachian singing tradition, he picked up a bass at twelve alongside his twin brother Andy's guitar and never found a reason to put it down. He's played with Billy Higgins, Delfeayo Marsalis, Eddie Daniels, and Babik Reinhardt. He's worked cruise ships and Swiss jazz festivals and LA studios. In Asheville, he holds down the low end for so many projects that listing them would take longer than the set itself. What matters is what he does in this room with these four people — which is build a floor so solid that everyone else can take risks they wouldn't dare take without him.\r\n\r\n**Evan Martin** came to drums sideways, through years as a guitarist leading bands before discovering that rhythm was the instrument he was born to play. That origin story matters. He listens like a melodic player. He responds to phrases, not just patterns. You can hear it in his work with Amanda Anne Platt and The Honeycutters, in Brian Felix's organ trio, and especially here, where the conversation between five musicians moves at the speed of trust.\r\n\r\nThey've recorded together at Echo Mountain Studios. They've played these Monday nights long enough to develop the kind of shorthand that can't be rehearsed. The creature in the corner has watched them find something true hundreds of times. This is the group that lives at the center of Asheville's jazz life, and they play for free every time they walk through the door.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1085/the-core","updated_at":"2026-03-01T15:29:25.121Z"},{"date":"2026-04-19","title":"Casey Driessen: Sunday Bazaar","location":"Little Jumbo: 241 Broadway St., Asheville, NC 28801","description":"Casey Driessen: Sunday Bazaar at Little Jumbo is a monthly residency on the 3rd Sunday where music spills out like treasures in a bustling market. Fiddle loops, wild grooves, sonic oddities, and vibrant rhythms mix together in a swirl of color and sound. Tease your tastebuds with expertly crafted cocktails and soak in the cozy, electric atmosphere. No two nights are alike—wander in, follow your ears, and see what you discover.","link":"https://littlejumbobar.com/events/1381/casey-driessen-sunday-bazaar","updated_at":"2026-01-19T22:58:28.351Z"}]